530 research outputs found
Lattice path matroids: enumerative aspects and Tutte polynomials
Fix two lattice paths P and Q from (0,0) to (m,r) that use East and North
steps with P never going above Q. We show that the lattice paths that go from
(0,0) to (m,r) and that remain in the region bounded by P and Q can be
identified with the bases of a particular type of transversal matroid, which we
call a lattice path matroid. We consider a variety of enumerative aspects of
these matroids and we study three important matroid invariants, namely the
Tutte polynomial and, for special types of lattice path matroids, the
characteristic polynomial and the beta invariant. In particular, we show that
the Tutte polynomial is the generating function for two basic lattice path
statistics and we show that certain sequences of lattice path matroids give
rise to sequences of Tutte polynomials for which there are relatively simple
generating functions. We show that Tutte polynomials of lattice path matroids
can be computed in polynomial time. Also, we obtain a new result about lattice
paths from an analysis of the beta invariant of certain lattice path matroids.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figure
On the number of matroids
We consider the problem of determining , the number of matroids on
elements. The best known lower bound on is due to Knuth (1974) who showed
that is at least . On the other hand, Piff
(1973) showed that , and it has
been conjectured since that the right answer is perhaps closer to Knuth's
bound.
We show that this is indeed the case, and prove an upper bound on that is within an additive term of Knuth's lower bound. Our proof
is based on using some structural properties of non-bases in a matroid together
with some properties of independent sets in the Johnson graph to give a
compressed representation of matroids.Comment: Final version, 17 page
Counting matroids in minor-closed classes
A flat cover is a collection of flats identifying the non-bases of a matroid.
We introduce the notion of cover complexity, the minimal size of such a flat
cover, as a measure for the complexity of a matroid, and present bounds on the
number of matroids on elements whose cover complexity is bounded. We apply
cover complexity to show that the class of matroids without an -minor is
asymptotically small in case is one of the sparse paving matroids
, , , , or , thus confirming a few special
cases of a conjecture due to Mayhew, Newman, Welsh, and Whittle. On the other
hand, we show a lower bound on the number of matroids without -minor
which asymptoticaly matches the best known lower bound on the number of all
matroids, due to Knuth.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure
On the number of matroids compared to the number of sparse paving matroids
It has been conjectured that sparse paving matroids will eventually
predominate in any asymptotic enumeration of matroids, i.e. that
, where denotes the number of
matroids on elements, and the number of sparse paving matroids. In
this paper, we show that We prove this by arguing that each matroid on elements has a
faithful description consisting of a stable set of a Johnson graph together
with a (by comparison) vanishing amount of other information, and using that
stable sets in these Johnson graphs correspond one-to-one to sparse paving
matroids on elements.
As a consequence of our result, we find that for some ,
asymptotically almost all matroids on elements have rank in the range .Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure
Natural realizations of sparsity matroids
A hypergraph G with n vertices and m hyperedges with d endpoints each is
(k,l)-sparse if for all sub-hypergraphs G' on n' vertices and m' edges, m'\le
kn'-l. For integers k and l satisfying 0\le l\le dk-1, this is known to be a
linearly representable matroidal family.
Motivated by problems in rigidity theory, we give a new linear representation
theorem for the (k,l)-sparse hypergraphs that is natural; i.e., the
representing matrix captures the vertex-edge incidence structure of the
underlying hypergraph G.Comment: Corrected some typos from the previous version; to appear in Ars
Mathematica Contemporane
Differentially Private Decomposable Submodular Maximization
We study the problem of differentially private constrained maximization of
decomposable submodular functions. A submodular function is decomposable if it
takes the form of a sum of submodular functions. The special case of maximizing
a monotone, decomposable submodular function under cardinality constraints is
known as the Combinatorial Public Projects (CPP) problem [Papadimitriou et al.,
2008]. Previous work by Gupta et al. [2010] gave a differentially private
algorithm for the CPP problem. We extend this work by designing differentially
private algorithms for both monotone and non-monotone decomposable submodular
maximization under general matroid constraints, with competitive utility
guarantees. We complement our theoretical bounds with experiments demonstrating
empirical performance, which improves over the differentially private
algorithms for the general case of submodular maximization and is close to the
performance of non-private algorithms
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